


What's the Price of a Mile?

by mynameisnemo



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Comfort Sex, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Character Death, No Romance, Post-Episode: s04e10 Carnage of Krell, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:07:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25539283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mynameisnemo/pseuds/mynameisnemo
Summary: Has man gone insaneA few will remainWho'll find a wayTo live one more dayThrough decades of warIt spreads like diseaseThere's no sign of peaceReligion and greed cause millions to bleed
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody/CT-7567 | Rex
Comments: 4
Kudos: 80





	What's the Price of a Mile?

**Author's Note:**

> Amidst the world doing /waves hands. All of _that_. I watched the Umbara-arc with [mark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/markiafc/pseuds/markiafc) and [kota](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigye) and it broke me. So please enjoy 3600ish words of my using them as punching bags for stress-relief and dealing with the after-action. 
> 
> The title is from [the song of the same name by Sabaton.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEY7Ton1gO4) The summary is from [A Lifetime of War, also by Sabaton.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkBXrenRhPQ) Both of these songs were most of my writing soundtrack for the fic and I do recommend giving them a listen while you read. 
> 
> All help for Star Wars-picking and beta-ing and encouragement goes to mark and kota. All remaining mistakes belong to me. 
> 
> And as a last note, I am only current through the Umbara-arc, so please keep all spoilers past that out of my comments so I can remain unspoiled.

The departure from Umbara is a mess. They hadn’t planned to leave so fast, especially not after they were successful in capturing the planet. But instead of a nice, orderly, capture the flag and then occupy the world until the actual occupying forces show up, what they have is a mess that has been completely FUBAR’d. A jedi accused of treason and then killed, the 501st with extraordinarily high casualties and no general of their own so they have been defacto placed under General Kenobi’s command and thus his. And the 212th with its own losses, some of them by friendly-fire. The whole mission is a cluster, even if they had accomplished the mission objective. 

So as soon as reinforcements arrive, Cody is busy getting the 501st and 212th off this forsaken rock. He doesn’t even bother dividing them up into their own divisions, just has the captains count troops off until they fill transports. 

They have a huge number of casualties, more than they have medical ships for, and he delegates them to Rex, to help organise them between the troops that will be transferred to Kaliida Shoals for long-term care and recovery and those with injuries that can be considered minor enough to be transported with their battalions and cared for by their own medics. 

Besides, Cody has seen how few of the 501st there are left. Mixing them in with the 212th will both free up a secondary carrier to go to Shoals and also mask the losses. They’ll have to deal with it eventually but for the moment he wants to pack them all in close enough that they can’t feel the empty spaces where their comrades should be. 

So he gets them all off the planet, back up into the carrier ships to take them away from this nightmare planet. He’s on the last shuttle to leave, General Kenobi’s command staff carrier, surrounded by familiar helmets and paint. He breathes a sigh of relief, knowing it will be short-lived. The work isn’t done, not by a long shot, but he can use the scant minutes from the surface to the ship to recenter. 

As soon as they are secured on the landing deck he swings back into motion, nodding General Kenobi off to the bridge and heading off to make sure everyone is settled. He walks through the troop quarters, nodding to the officers and stopping here and there to speak to the ones who look like they could use a word. They are packed in, organising themselves between the armoury, the mess, the shower line. It’s familiar chaos, easy to get lost in, and that’s the point. Keep moving because standing still means death. So he takes off his helmet and walks among his men, keeping them moving. 

That keeps him busy for a while before he realises that he hasn’t seen Rex in a while. He’s crossed Fives’s path a few times, the ARC trooper seeming to be assuming the same role Cody has of being a familiar and calming presence, but when he thinks about it he hasn’t seen Rex since…

Since he saw him get on board the next-to-last transport off Umbara. It was the same transport Fives had been on, so he knows they made it. Knows he’s not missing a transport’s worth of men. But Rex is nowhere to be found. 

He knows Rex got on the transport under his own power, looking worn but healthy enough. He hadn’t seemed injured but Cody checks the infirmary anyway, walking between the rows of injured clones getting checked out or visiting their injured comrades.

He sees a few blond clones but none of them are the one he's looking for.

He keeps searching, ignoring how his feet hurt. How he feels like he could just kip up in one of these hallways and sleep like the dead even on the cold metal deck. How he's hungry for something besides emergency rations. How he still feels the need to shower the creeping stink of death and Umbara off his skin.

But he can’t rest until he's checked in with all of his men and right now the one he's most concerned about seems to have disappeared. 

Cody wanders into less and less populated areas of the ship. Down into the bowels near the engine where it's more likely he'll run across an engineering droid than a person. The people he does see are crew, not the soldiers with faces as familiar as his own in the mirror. He meanders until he walks into one of the droid repair bays where spare parts and droids that are beyond saving are stored, waiting to be parted out or offloaded and melted down.

It's destroyed. Machinery thrown all over the place. One of the heavy metal tables flipped on its side, the thick bolts that were meant to secure it to the deck twisted and shorn. No signs of life but it looks like a couple of wookies went at it cage-match style in here.

“What the…” he mutters under his breath, feeling adrenaline spike through his head, wishing that he had brought something other than his sidearm with him to deal with whatever made this mess.

He turns to raise the alarm and call for backup, to run back to the hall and start moving the crew away from this area until they can do a threat assessment, but under the whisper of the door sliding open he hears it.

A shaky breath drawn in.

He turns back, half expecting to find an injured crew member, a casualty of whatever happened in here, but as he rounds the table, clearing the space with his blaster first, he finds the man he's spent the last few hours searching for.

Rex is sitting on the ground, back against the wall, head in his hands and elbows braced against his knees where they are drawn up by his chest. He’s partly hidden by an overturned parts shelf. His helmet sits near him on its side, the receiver antenna snapped clean off, as if he had thrown it at the wall.

He still looks uninjured but Cody can’t see his face and his shoulders are heaving like he's panting from exertion.

Or is it something else that's making him heave like that?

“Rex?” Cody asks, keeping his voice low, in case there’s a threat he can’t see. Or to keep from startling the man. “Everything okay?” He can tell it's not but he needs to determine if this is an active threat or if it's something else. 

No response. 

“Captain, situation report.” He inserts a bit of command into it, keeping his voice quiet but moving it closer to an order than a question.

“‘m'fine,” Rex grunts out but he still doesnt look up. “No outside threat. Go look after the men, I'll be up once I clean up in here.”

Cody snorts and holsters his blaster, turning to edge in past the scattered detritus until he’s next to Rex, kicking debris out of the way until there's enough space to slide down the wall next to him. He sits close but leaves a millimeter of space between them, not close enough to touch. He's not sure where Rex's head is at just yet and he doesn’t want to spark a reaction that Rex will regret later.

He mirrors Rex's position as he settles, knees up, setting his helmet down on the ground next to him before picking up Rex's helmet, turning it over in his hands. Looking at the new scuff marks on the already beat to hell armour. He's not sure if they are from the battle on Umbara. Battles. Or maybe from whatever Rex was doing that left him sitting in the middle of a destroyed room.

“I mean it,” Rex growls out, voice still muffled by his hands. “Go take care of the men.”

Cody sighs, tips his head back to rest on the bulkhead. “All taken care of. Cleaned up and racked up to wait for the next battle.”

Rex jerks, one hand flying out like he's blocking a punch. “Don't,” he bites out. “Don’t talk about them like that. Like they're…”

He trails off and Cody wonders what word he was going to use. Tools? Disposable? Fodder?  


Cody wonders just what the hell happened on Umbara under Krell's command. He hadn’t gotten a full after action yet, hadn’t asked for details from the hollow-eyed and silent 501st before he went looking for Rex.

He sits in silence for a while, waiting. He doesn’t feel like he needs to apologise or take the words back. It's something they joke about, an acknowledgement of the truth of how other people see them, this army of men manufactured for the single use purpose of fighting a war they won't live long enough to have stakes in.

They sit in silence until Rex's breaths steady. Until he sits back, tilting his head to mirror Cody's position now. His face is dirty still, streaked with mud from Umbara, tracks on his face where sweat has run.

Cody doesn’t say anything about how his cheeks seem cleaner now than they had when he got on the transport. How it looks like the dirt has been wiped away from his eyes along with some other kind of moisture.

He holds out Rex's helmet to him but he doesn’t react to the offer. Just stares at it for a moment before he turns his eyes to sweep over the room with an unimpressed eye. 

“Should put myself on KP for a month for this mess, “ he grumbles, his body twitching as though he was thinking about getting up before he settles back, breathing out a sigh that still sounds too ragged, too exhausted for Cody's tastes.

“That's what janitor droids are for,” Cody says, finally feeling like it's safe to break his own silence. “Let them earn their keep.”

Rex sighs again but doesn’t respond. Closes his eyes. 

Cody waits for the next thing, waits for him to talk about Krell, about the wreckage, about anything really. Waits long enough that he opens his mouth to suggest that they get out of here, go up to the mess and get something to eat, but as he does Rex finally speaks. 

“I'm sorry about Waxer.”

And that. That wasn’t what Cody was expecting. He knows about the friendly fire. Heard the reports from his own men after he sent them off under Waxer’s command to meet the enemy troops in disguise.

He was in the room when the report came in about Krell's treason. Had been standing next to General Kenobi when the reason for and method of his subsequent execution had been given.  


He breathes out his own shaky sigh. Thinks of how the first thing he had wondered was _Who's dead? Who have we lost now?_  


The moment of breathtaking fear until Fives's words had registered. _Captain Rex is readying the base for exfil._ How his next breath had felt like he was taking in his very first breath again, full of relief to know that Rex was still there, still in good enough shape to issue commands.

He hadn’t known about Waxer. Had missed that he wasn’t among the wounded or the just weary as he made his way through the ship. But the loss still stings. They all try to act as if they don’t have favourites under their command. It's not fair to the men they lead, these men who are closer than brothers to them, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t.

He'll have to break the news to Boil when they get back to Coruscant. Boil who has been left behind in the infirmary with injuries from their last battle, still recovering and joking about Waxer bringing him back a souvenir from Umbara. _But I don’t mean any little kids, don’t go adopting anyone else._

“I didn’t know,” he starts, hearing how choked up he is as if from a distance. Rex startles, eyes sliding over to meet his. His eyes are full of pain and guilt, a crippling misery that Cody has never seen before. He wonders if he's ever looked like that before, hopes he never does.

“I was there,” Rex starts, his voice rough and breaking off before he swallows, starts again. “I was there when he…”

And that means it wasn’t fast. That Rex must have looked at him in the eyes as he died from a wound that was caused by an order that Rex gave.

Cody tries to swallow down the grief. He’ll feel it later. Later when he has the space to bow his head under the weight of their continued, continuous losses. When he finds a moment between battles to mourn Waxer and all the other losses. And if that moment never comes then that’s just fine. 

But for now he still has to make sure all his soldiers make it out of the fight and Rex hasn’t. Not yet. 

He realises he’s been quiet too long when Rex pulls away. Not far, he doesn’t have much room to move with the way he’s already pushed up against the rack he’d overturned, but Cody recognises the movement as a withdrawal. The way Rex tips his head away as if he’s accepting a rejection, the way he pulls his arms and legs in closer as if he’s expecting a blow. Making himself much smaller than a man of his size in full armour minus helmet should be able to. Maybe he doesn’t actually expect that Cody will strike out at him, but Cody wonders if that isn’t exactly what the memories of the last few days of hell aren’t doing to him already. 

“He was a good man,” Cody says, putting Rex’s helmet down beside his own and turning. Up until now he hadn’t wanted to touch Rex, hadn’t been sure a friendly hand would be welcome. But now he feels like he couldn’t possibly do anything except provide a shoulder to lean on until Rex can stand on his own again. He reaches out, wrapping an arm around Rex’s shoulders and pulling him in. Their armour isn’t conducive to this kind of comfort, banging together as they come together and forcing an uncomfortable gap but it doesn’t matter when Rex turns into him, his head coming to rest against Cody’s pauldron and Cody can hear his unsteady breaths up close, can feel the ghost of them against his bare neck. 

“He didn’t deserve to go out that way,” Rex mumbles, his voice thick. 

“None of them do,” Cody answers, squeezing Rex harder against him for a moment. “None of us do.” 

Rex shudders against him, twisting to press his face against Cody’s neck, his hand coming up to scrabble against Cody’s chest, his shoulder, before he gets a grip on Cody’s arm and tries to pull himself even closer. 

This is something Cody is familiar with, something that’s happened before. The aftermath of a hard battle coalescing into a need for comfort, for reassurance that they are both still alive, still here and whole. The reminder that there is touch in the world more than a friendly clap on the shoulder, a shove out of the line of fire, the feeling of being dragged away from battle after injury. 

He draws his arms around Rex, struggling to pull his gauntlets off behind his back and letting them drop to the floor with a loud clatter. He pauses a moment before realising that if Rex hadn’t drawn attention while he was working his frustrations out on the room that it was unlikely anyone would come running just from the sound of armour hitting the ground. 

Once his hands are bare he reaches up, passing his hand over the back of Rex’s head. Feels the way his hair is greasy and dirty from the fight, the way it bristles under Cody’s palm from a fresh cut just before they boarded transports for Umbara. 

He’d been hanging out in the barber shop as Rex had it buzzed, joking around about the short tufts of soft blonde fuzz being shorn off. As soft as that fluff had been, Rex keeps his hair short enough to prickle at his palm as he passes his hand over it a few times before Rex sits back, hands coming up to fumble at the latches of Cody’s armour. 

Cody returns the favour, his task made easier by bare hands, until he’s got Rex stripped down to just his base layer while Rex is still struggling with Cody’s utility belt. 

Cody shifts him, pushing him back and down onto the floor and kneeling over him to remove his own bottom armour before he yanks at the front of Rex’s base layer until the material parts on its hidden seam, pulling apart to reveal his chest and stomach and groin. Cody does the same for himself, pushing the sleeves with it until he’s stripped to the waist before he lowers himself to press against Rex’s scarred body, skin to skin. 

He’s not hard yet and neither is Rex but he can feel the heat and adrenaline flooding him, knows it won’t take long. Can feel Rex beginning to get there himself where he’s pressed against Cody’s hip. 

But he can also feel the desperate way Rex clings to his arms, his shoulders, his back as they move against each other. Knows that it’s not really about the sex but about the affirmation that they are both still here, that there are still things in the galaxy that can feel good. He grinds his hips down against Rex’s, feeling his dick slide between their stomachs alongside Rex’s and the way he’s getting close, closer, until he has to lean onto one elbow, reaching between them to catch them both up in his hand.

Rex shouts, throwing his head back against the metal deck hard enough for Cody to wince as he starts to come, his hips bucking into Cody’s and his cock pulsing in Cody’s hand sending him over the edge a breath later. 

Cody collapses down, feeling the sticky wetness between them spread more on his stomach and chest. Feeling Rex heaving for breath underneath him even as his hands still grip at the skin on Cody’s back hard enough to hurt now that Cody’s no longer distracted. 

They lay like that until both of them are breathing evenly again, until Rex’s grip relaxes, before Cody rolls off, swearing as he lands on something metal that digs into his hip until he knocks it away. 

“Got to say, we’ve chosen better places to do that,” he snarks, then holds his breath to see how Rex will respond. 

Rex hums, swinging his hand out to give Cody a desulatory pat on his stomach before he winces at the mess he encounters and pulls back. “Definitely chosen places with better clean up facilities.” He lies motionless for another beat before levering himself to his feet, casting about until he finds a scrap of rag to swipe at the mess on his own stomach and wincing at the black streaks of grease it leaves behind. 

Cody is glad to see him moving with a hint of his usual energy again. 

“Time for a bath, pal,” Cody says, taking the hand Rex reaches down to him and letting himself be pulled to his own feet. He seals up his base layer again, grimacing at the way he can feel it sticking to his skin, before he dons his armour. It’s disgusting but better than a walk of shame all the way back to the officer’s quarters. At least as a commander he has the benefit of semi-private quarters and showers and he doubts anyone else will be there to see them. He wants to check Rex over again for injury. He hadn’t seen anything when he had him stripped down but then he still hadn’t seen a lot of his skin or been paying close attention to that sort of thing. Speaking of which. “How’s the noggin?” he asks, looking over at Rex who has similarly re-dressed himself, his hands much more steady on the latches than when he was trying to undo them. 

Rex looks back at him and reaches to rub a hand over the back of his head, making a rueful face. “Bit of a bump but nothing I haven’t had before.” 

“It’ll take more than that to land you in the infirmary again then, come on, I’m starving.”

Rex nods, reaching down to pick up their helmets from where they are still resting next to one another by the wall. He hands Cody’s over but then seems to pause, turning to look over the wreckage of the room. “You go on ahead, I’ll-”

“Nope,” Cody interrupts, reaching out to catch Rex’s elbow and interrupt the spiral of self-flagellation he can see forming. “Food. Shower. Minimum 8 hours confinement to your bunk. Or mine, I don’t care which. I’ll notify the servitor droids that there was an accident in the droid repair room. At least they won’t notice the smell.”

And it does smell, though Cody’s not sure how much of that is noticeable and how much of it is having recently had his face pressed up against Rex’s skin where he could smell the blood and mud and sweat and sex that he reeks of. 

“Come on,” he says again, pulling an unresisting Rex out the door and letting it whisper shut behind them

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. <3


End file.
